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MIDI ROUTING AND RECORDING IN ABLETON LIVE

Recording MIDI is one of Ableton Live’s core activities. Martin Delaney takes an extended look at some fundamental – and some more sophisticated – MIDI recording and routing techniques

TECHNIQUE MIDI ROUTING AND RECORDING

ABLETON LIVE TUTORIAL

Whether you’re aware of it, or interested in it or not, MIDI is everywhere in Ableton Live – enabling hardware controllers to take over Live’s mixer, instrument and effect parameters, coordinating timing synchronisation with other hardware and software, sending notes to trigger instrument sounds or loops and providing transport and song-position information. From time to time, it’s good to recap on the ultra-basics of what MIDI is and how to use it inside Live and then to mention a few more interesting techniques, relating to different routing options inside Live’s MIDI tracks and instrument and drum racks. MIDI goes back to 1983 and a great resource if you want to learn more is the MIDI Association website at www.midi.org. Live is limited regarding MIDI in some areas, but these are more than compensated for the ease of use and by the excellent MIDI effect devices which are included in Live – so you don’t get the deep MIDI compositional programming controls of some other software, but you get a lot of creative and interactive input. In our walkthrough, we’re looking at the basics of recording MIDI notes into Live from drum pads and a keyboard, then moving on to a few more advanced routing tips. There are so many MIDI controllers on the market, some specialise in being either drum oriented, with pads, or keyboard oriented, with just a piano keyboard, but there are also controllers that provide a MIDI keyboard with a few drum pads on top. You can do it the old-school way, playing drum parts on your MIDI keys. You can also record beats via the computer keyboard, although you won’t get any velocity – but Live has the Velocity MIDI effect device to add velocity variations afterwards. Finally, there’s Ableton’s Push 2, which has beautiful pads, just as good for creating beats as they are for playing scales and chords.

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Find the complete article and many more in this issue of
MusicTech
-
Nov 17

About MusicTech

We’re very excited to reveal our new-look issue, which is on sale from Thursday 19th October, and we’ve gone the extra mile to give you something really special.
Building up the courage to share your tracks over the internet is one thing, but performing them live is something else entirely. That’s where our cover feature, From Studio To Stage comes in. With 7-pages of expert advice from Matin Delaney you’ll be gig-ready in no time.
Elsewhere in the mag we chat with Emre Ramazanoglu, who’s body of work includes several 2017 movie soundtracks as well as some of the biggest pop releases in recent years. Additionally we present our 10 tips to speed up your computer (without buying a new one), a retrospective on the Roland SH-101 and 6 reasons to buy more gear (as if you needed any).
This and so much more in the new-look issue of MusicTech magazine.